LTDC Online News

Currently, there are five UW campuses participating in a D2L ePortfolio pilot that will last from Spring 2009 to the end of Spring 2010.  At UWM, we have 28 faculty, instructors, and administrators who have signed on to participate in the pilot over the course of the upcoming year.  This group will either teach or work with approximately 250-300 students.  The disciplines, colleges and units on campus represented by this group includes Administrative Leadership, Anthropology, Architecture, Business Administration, Education, English (Composition and Business Writing), English as a Second Language, French, Japanese, Journalism and Mass Communication, Library internships, Nursing, Sport and Recreation, Translation, and Visual Arts.  Many of these courses are within programs that have attempted to use portfolios in one form or another over the years, and so their uses of the ePortfolio will range from the simple collection and distribution of finished products to the development of group projects using the ePortfolio tool for the creation of files and documents. 

In addition, two courses used the ePortfolio during Summer 2009: “UWM Writing Project: Teachers as Writers” (Curriculum and Instruction 740), a course that helps teachers develop a sense of self-awareness as writer by creating portfolios of work in order to be better writing teachers; and “Applied Clinical Chemistry” (Clinical Science 542), a senior capstone course in which clinical science students work on collecting documents and evidence of professional development for program review.  Both classes have approximately 25 students and multiple instructors working together.  Feedback from students and faculty in the two courses was generally very positive.  Technically, students were able to use all of the tools available in the ePortfolio fairly easily and without any major problems; a one-hour training session appeared to be more than sufficient for them.  Course instructors and students shared documents amongst each other, offering comments and feedback for the development of course assignments; students were then asked to use the ePortfolio to assemble these documents into web presentations that were submitted for final evaluation in D2L Dropboxes.

Because faculty in the pilot are experienced users of D2L, we anticipate that faculty will be able support their own students fairly well, as the interface for the ePortfolio is generally very similar to that for D2L instructors.  Support for the pilot is run through the Learning Technology Center, and we are planning to use the ePortfolio tool to create and distribute our help sheets and FAQs to students and faculty.  Finally, we will distribute formal evaluation mechanisms to the students and faculty after their participation in the pilot has ended.

Recently, Information Communications Systems (ICS) hosted three speakers as part of the ICS Presents speaker series. The first speaker was Alan Wolf of the UW-Madison Division of Information Technology. His presentation was titled, “A Non-Librarian’s Look at the Growing World of Digital Libraries.” The second speaker was Molly Immendorf of UW-Extension, Cooperative Extension. Her presentation was on Social Media and Social Networking. The final speaker was Maria Andersen of Muskegon Community College who presented on “Organizing Your Digital Self.” Access the archives and reference materials at http://www.uwex.edu/ics/news/icspresents.htm
The series was funded by an LTDC grant.

Submitted by Rich Berg
Instructional Communications Systems
University of Wisconsin-Extension

UW-Extension Continuing Education, Outreach, and eLearning (CEOEL) is occupied with preparations for the Fall 2009 semester. Most notably is the new Sustainable Management (SMGT) program coming online this fall. Six courses are currently under development with faculty from partner campuses in the degree; general topics range from environmental science to economics in sustainability. Student applications to the program are coming in and expectations are high for the initial semester launch. With the inclusion of SMGT, as well as the other online programs that we support, we expect to launch roughly 100 completely online course sections for the Fall 2009 semester.

Submitted by Scott Reeser
CEOEL

At UW-Green Bay, many unique processes occur behind the scenes to ensure successful implementation of Student Response Systems, or clickers for instructional use.  First, the Learning Technology Center (LTC) requires all instructors who plan to use clickers to let them know before the following semester’s course schedule is due.  Once the classes are flagged in the PeopleSoft Student Information System (SIS), they appear in the course catalog as clicker classes so students are aware of the fact that they must have clickers and pay a clicker rental fee (which occurs automatically via the SIS when they register) for the class.

When the semester begins, students check out the clickers from the library circulation desk, much as they would a book or other resource.  This upcoming fall 2009 semester, there will be an additional step in the checkout process that will also register the student clickers – this will link the student information with the clicker device ID and send it to a roster that instructors can download and use with the clicker software.  In the past, students registered themselves on a separate web page, but they would often make mistakes or neglect to register their clickers resulting in no participation credit or other problems. The new automated registration process will eliminate such problems.

At the end of the semester, clickers are returned to the library (if not, a fee will be applied to the student’s account).  The library staff then cleans the clickers and checks them for any major blemishes or technical problems.  The LTC staff also replaces the batteries and upgrades the firmware for all clickers annually. 

Initially, there was significant growth in clicker use, but in recent semesters, the number has plateaued at about 25-30% of the student population using clickers each term.  Green Bay’s clicker processes work very effectively, and they help students and instructors easily incorporate clickers in the classroom to enhance teaching and learning.

Here is a video that provides a nice overview of clickers and examples of how they are used at UW-Green Bay (created in Fall 2008): Link to Introduction to Clickers YouTube Video.

Submitted by Leif Nelson
UW-Green Bay

Dr. Beth Preston is a member of the English faculty at UW-Eau Claire. I have had the pleasure of working with her on her ascent into instructional technology during the past couple years. She has Camtasia-ed, Dreamweaver-ed, QualityMatters-ed, and D2L-ed (among other-eds) her instructional content to increase student learning and engagement.

Beth describes this foray in the following:

In the spring semester of 2005, one of my students asked me, “Dr. Preston, why don’t you post stuff on D2L? It’s so much easier to use than the W-drive.” I looked at him blankly; I hadn’t even heard of D2L at that point in my career. Following this tip, I started asking around, and by Fall 2006, I was using D2L as an organizational tool from which my students could download handouts and some articles. Little did I know where this new-found path would lead.

By the end of 2006, I began using D2L for much more than “handouts”: I started using the quiz feature for short “did you read the assignment” multiple choice quizzes and the Discussion feature for peer-responses to writing assignments. While the multiple-choice quiz with all its features does take more time to prepare than an in-class quiz, once the questions are created and saved in the Question Library, they are effortlessly available and re-usable. More importantly, I discovered that using the Discussion forum for peer-response resulted in a much higher level of engagement among students. My interest in using D2L and in teaching online heightened, and in Summer of 2008, after taking the Summer Online training offered by LTS, I taught my first completely online course, English 275 (The Novel), and I began developing a blended version of English 110 (we meet half the time online and half the time on D2L), which I taught for the first time in Spring 2008. While my novel course uses a traditional D2L format, my blended course is designed in Dreamweaver, which takes more time to create but results in a highly pleasing aesthetic. Students have responded very favorably to both of these courses.

In addition to using D2L, I have enhanced my courses over the past two years by attending LTS-sponsored workshops on “backwards course design,” Adobe Photoshop, Quality Matters, and Digital Storytelling, learning and then including programs such as Audacity, Camtasia, and MovieMaker. I use them myself as teaching tools, and I teach my students how to use them as well. Audacity allows students to post and hear oral materials; Camtasia provides students with my voice narration through a sequence of PowerPoint slides, and MovieMaker encourages students to use visual mediums with voice and text. Students consistently report that the MovieMaker assignments (which usually focus on their relationship to one or more of UWEC’s liberal education goals) are enjoyable and meaningful, and altogether, we—I and my students—agree that the technology included in both English 110 and English 275 enhances the learning experience.

Submitted by Gene Leisz
UW-Eau Claire LTDC Rep

Here is what is happening at the UW Colleges:

Six UW Colleges academic departments are participating in the ePortfolio Pilot.  Faculty who are on the tenure track will be building their dossier in D2L using Desire2Learn’s ePortfolio.  To get this project started, we are providing a demo site in D2L where I am building my promotion portfolio as an example.  Next we will be creating a Captivate or Camtasia video with narration, for the faculty to watch before beginning their work. Each department has an ePortfolio site in D2L where the faculty will build their ePortfolio.  They have until November (for folks in their 3rd year) or January, 2010, (all others) depending on where they are on the track. We have decided to not allow them to create tags, we are going to be building a tag library, so it is consistent. The department chairs are providing the terminology to use for the tags.  In the fall we will be training the review committee members, from both the campuses and departments, campus Deans, and the Provost, and his PA,  on how to access, export (if necessary), and review the ePortfolios.  The faculty themselves will be responsible for making sure the campus and departmental committee members have the necessary access to their ePortfolio by the due date.  Finally, there will be online evaluations for the faculty, the review committees and the Provost and Deans to complete once the pilot is near its end. Support for this project will be provide through our Service Center. Note that all training will be provided on a website, instead of using WisLine Web to save money and to make the training for this project as convenient as possible.  We are hoping it is successful and that we can add merit, promotion, and post-tenure review to the ePortfolio system in the future AND have all departments and campuses involved.

During this past year we piloted clickers on 5 campuses, and based on the success of the pilot and interest from other campuses, we were able to use year-end money to purchase a clicker kit for the other 13 campuses to begin to build interest among their faculty. Training will be provided using Camtasia, Captivate or iMovie videos.

Of course we have several other projects going on, but these two are new and exciting!

Submitted by Pat Fellows
UW-Colleges